heeler the peeler's fashion tips for the young man about town

Stop holding in your bellies.

If that worked, we'd all be getting some.

engaging with the culture

 

Flicking through the channels on my neighbour's sexevision.

Getting rid of my own TV clearly hasn't stopped me seeking out the company of other people's TVs.

I come upon John Lennon (may the God he thought his pop group was bigger than, bring him into heaven) singing a soulful rendition of a famous song he wrote in praise of the female sexual gender sort of thing.

John Lennon sings his actual lyrics ie no parody of mine:

"Woman

I know you understand

The little child inside the man

Please remember my life is in your hands

And woman

Hold me close to your heart

However distant don't keep us apart

Remember it's written in the stars...

Doo doo doo doo

Doo doo doo doo

I love you yeah yeah

Now and forever"

Ah yes.

Even the greatest rock stars sometimes run the risk of sounding a bit like one of my parodies of them.

But this was all him.

And let it be said, a man would want to be some kind of a cosmic churl not to be touched by the poetry in that John Lennon song.

With a cry of infantile rage and the snarl I preserve for arguing with the television, I mute the sound and hurl the remote control to the floor.

Cosmic churl as many of you know, is my middle name.

I took it for my confo.

"The problem with that song," I rant bitterly, "is that it's not clear if he's addressing his first wife or the mistress or the second wife, or the groupies, or the mistresses he had during the second marriage."

Presently I come up with an alternative version of the song that seems more historically accurate.

I croon it.

It goes:

"Woman

I must confess

I love your beauty and your tenderness

Towards a man who's a billion dollar success

And woman

I'm writing you a song

To ask forgiveness for my every wrong

And to say I'll love you till something better comes along

I love you

Oh yeah

Until something better comes along

Doo den doo doo doo

I love you

Oh yeah

Until something better comes along

Doo den doo doo

Doo den doo doo

And woman

I must confess

I love you more than the last mistress

Okay maybe just a little bit less

But I l-o-o-o-o-o-o-ve you

Oh yeah

Until something better comes along

Doo den doo doo doo

I l-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-ve you

Yeah yeah

Until something betrer comes along"

a town like alice i mean bray

 

Afternoon in the seaside town of Bray.

I'm here for an unemployment seminar ie a meeting with potential employers hosted by the Department of Social Welfare.

After the meeting I go for a carefree stroll.

The town strikes me as most curious.

Historically it dates from two hundred years ago and was established in its present form by a landlord during the period of colonial rule from Britain.

There are odd lingering mixes of Britishness and Irishness in the layout and style of the buildings. And in the people too maybe.

A yacht club building with cutesy olde worlde railings seems lost in a reverie about the time Bray was a way station in one of the great empires of the world. 

Victorian style houses line the sea front alongside (newer) millionaires' villas.

A somnolent historical fugg lingers over the place even as the brash present day asserts itself more and more.

The streets are thronged with varying ethnicities. Old and new Irish and some very new Irish indeed.

The streetscape undulates.

Finery and a faint seediness juxtaposed everywhere.

An atmospheric church dedicated to Christ The Redeemer thrones on Main Street.

There is a feeling of prosperity in the commercial centre not entirel dissipated by numerous shuttered shops.

A river, a bridge, a park, a railway line, and near the harbour many warehouses with graffiti.

Lovely sylvan fields within the precincts of the town but threatened by modern housing developments as tasteless as they are unnecessary.

Those hills we Irish insist are mountains cluster round the town, including one called the Sugar Loaf and another eyecatching lumpy thing near the ocean promenade whose name no one I met knows.

In a cafe on the promenade I see a characterful weatherbeaten fellow wearing a yachting hat.

What fascinates me is that his bicycle helmet reposes on the table in front of him.

So presumably he cycles to the cafe in the bicycle helmet and then puts on the yachting cap to drink his tea.

I am quite pleased as I leave when he gives me a jaunty sea dog's salute.

At some stage Bray became a holiday resort for the city of Dublin and it has all the poignant tacky glamour of places that at a certain time in Summer come alive and then go back to sleep again for the rest of the year.

I resist the urge to enter the casino.

It has to be said: the mountainy bits are really nice in close proximity to the urban area.

And of course the sea.

The ghost of John Keats appears beside me on the promenande and declaims conspiratorially:

"Oh ye who have your eyeballs vexed and tired, feast them upon the wildness of the sea."

He's right too.

The sea, the sea, the mystic sea...

God made the sea for healing.

The wildness and serenity of the sea.

What balm to the soul.

A lot of swans here too.

No disresepect to the other birds who tried manfully to get my attention.

But the swans are emblems of heaven.

I'm told the swans of Bray started with a single pair twenty years ago.

Now there's hundreds.

The beauty of the creation is not diminished by abundance.

Walking back to my car I see some striking graffiti on the external cladding of an ugly metal railway bridge.

Whoever put it there had to risk their lives to do it.

Fifty feet above concrete and river.

I'm trying to figure out how they managed it.

The graffiti reads:

"KLAUS SCHWB CAN KISS MY ASS"

The spelling of Schwab omits a required "a" but otherwise it's quite an impressive piece of draftsmanship.

I smile wondering did the garaffiti artist leave out the "a" in Schwab on purpose or did he get to the end of his scrolling blissfully unware of the omission, climb over the perilous gantryway back to safety, struggle through the thorny underbrush, bruised, scratched and bleeding, all the way back down to the riverside and only then from the clear vantage point of the walkway, risk a satisfied contemplative look back at his handiwork and realise, with all the angst of a frustrated Leonardo after putting an extra testicle on David, that he'd left out the "a" in Schwab?

(If Leonardo had actually put on extra testicle on David, Michaelangelo would have killed him. Because Michaelangelo sculpted David. - Ed note)

(Shuh up. - Heelers note)

The enigmas endure.

This wry speculation about the graffiti artist's true intent appeals to me mightily.

The thought behind the graffiti is quite appealing too.

For the eponymous Schwab is chairman of a group of super rich individuals and their attendant corporate entities who are reputed to exercise improper influence over governments and the fate of nations.

He's also famous because the commentator Mark Steyn does a rather engaging impression of him as a James Bond villain.

So.

At last some some graffiti I can actually approve of.

It actually makes the railway bridge look good.

I'm really beginning to like Bray.

Back in the car park my car has been clamped by a company styling itself APCOA.

It's an above ground carpark beside a supermarket where parking might be expected to be free. But I should have checked.

Early onset dementia is not generally accepted by clampers as a reason to release the cars they have mugged.

By mobile phone I contact the clampers who inform me they will not cancel the fine and they will not accept cash if I wish to pay it.

Well here's larks.

Refusing the legal currency of the State used to be illegal in the Republic of Ireland

In any case I don't have any cash for APCOA to refuse.

Certainly not the 125 Euro they're demanding I pay them in non cash form.

Nor do I have a credit card.

Nor do I have a friend to ask for help.

I ring someone who might pass for a friend on a dark night and ask her to pay it for me which she does using her own credit card.

the may month in ireland

 

At the edge of memory glimmers lilac blossom.

This year's purply burgeoning blooms with their poignant musky scent evoke the blossoms of other Summers long lost to me.

The dandelions carpeted on the lawn have a timelessness too.

Then there's the cherry blossoms on Mrs Moran's tree which seem more luscious than usual.

The much loved white flowered plant called Summer Snow is flooding along the borders as is a veritable copse of Honesty plants also white flowered but with blooms that later in the season, in a strange and beautiful genesis, will turn silvery and take on the texture of little coins.

Summer Snow is known technically as Cerastium Tomentosum.

Honesty Plants are referred to as Lunaria.

I commend both to your attention.

The flowers that is, not the Latin names.

A further forest of white flowers is beginning to show but I don't know what they're called.

I planted them one year and then complained plaintively to the Deity: "Nothing I plant ever grows."

The following year they sprang up again in strength all over the place and have been with us in fine effusion ever since. Their blossoms look like bells.

I call them Mabel flowers after a neighbour's child who practiced her gymnastics among them one year and changed the shape of the bells somewhat.

The gladiolusseses have shown up with their incomparable pale pink hued opalescent translucent pearlescent roseate blah blah blah.

Me and the gladiolus have a shirty relationship.

I mean what sort of a flower shows up just for one week in the year, outshines everything else in the garden, and then goes as suddenly as it came, without a backward glance.

If a woman did it, a poet might get miffed.

Not to mention the fact that my refusal to write gladioli for the plural reduces me to gladiolusseseses and such like.

There's already one pink rose showing on the big rose bush. Very promising.

The poet Dorothy Parker has a verse about wishing her boyfriends would stop sending her one perfect rose and send her one perfect Mercedes Benz instead.

I think the singer Janis Joplin borrowed the thought half a century later for a merry little song that includes the lyric: "Lord won't you buy me a Mercedes Benz."

Personally I find that there are too many unseemly characters driving around in luxury cars paid for with the blood of dead junkies, cars like BMW's black Audis and the aforementioned Mercedes Benzeseses (Mercedes Benzi?) for the brands to retain any appeal.

I prefer roses.

With a bit of luck my brave hyrdrangeas will be back soon too. They've never flourished but they've never died out either. I want to have an ocean of them in blues and cerises.

The garden is full of my old pals, Jackdaws, robins, magpies, thrushes, blackbirds wood pigeons, Tom Tits, bullfinches, doves, crows, hooded crows and other hangers on. (Hint: The hooded crows are the ones that used to chase Penelope Pitstop.)

The Jackdaws have built a nest in the chimney. Last year they built it a bit loosely and it fell down into my living room where Cloudie Budgie normally lives free, ie not in her cage. I returned home that day and found the two Jackdaws in the living room and no sign of the budgie. I figured out what had happened and thought to myself: "Poor ould Cloudie. The wild birds are after eating her."

Somewhat ruefully I had opened the windows and the Jackdaws made their exit.

Then I sat quietly on the couch to think of the little budgie, a mourning session which only came to an end when Cloudie gave a little cheep from her hiding place in the bookshelf crouched between a James Thurber collection and CS Lewis' The Great Divorce.

There was life in the old budgie yet.

The blackbirds move across the grass like a wave of the sea. Their grace is quite distinctive. And that's even before they start singing.

Some darling startlings have built a nest in the eaves outside my bedroom window. I expect to be wakened by the sound of fledgelings twittering for the moon any day now.

The thrush has taken to smashing open snail shells on my front doorstep. I like the thrush. He's a big fatty. But smashing open snails on my doorstep is a bit primal for me.

There are also some scarlet plumed birds who are definitely not robins or bullfinches. There are little pippit birds which could be anything. And yellowy green things which just might be Yellow Hammers. The smaller birds have to be careful of  Tiger cat from up the road who has adopted me and another purposeful looking Tabby, this one with an unknown owner, who comes by in the afternoons apparently with the intention of ingesting my parrot. (I mean the cat wants to ingest the parrot not that the cat's unknown owner wants to ingest the parrot.) When this cat stares longingly in the window, Beaky parrot positively loses the run of himself. I don't blame him.

The nights are still.

It's not the Christmas hush.

It's something else.

Very close.

I think of Ukraine which is being bombed to smithereens in an attempted land grab by the resovietising dictatorship of Vladimir Putin in Russia.

Yet I have found peace in my own place.

A haven for sinners.

At the edge of  memory.

Where the lilac blossom glimmers.